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Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Sleep it off, you baby!

We started the dreaded sleep training on baby Roxy. If you ever want to feel like the worst person in the world, and there aren't any seals around, or clubs to hit them with, may I suggest sleep-training a baby.

You might not think that sleeping is something that anyone needs to be taught how to do-- certainly not anyone related to me-- but when it comes to babies this is something of a learned skill. They get tired but they don't know that the proper response to that is to put your head down and stop crying for five goddamn minutes until you fall asleep. If you want them to take a nap you have to be a bit of a hardass and let them wail in the crib until they exhaust themselves. Eventually--eventually--they figure out that they can skip the crying part and go right to the good stuff.

I'll go in once or twice to comfort her during the crying-it-out process, because I'm not a complete ghoul. It's absolutely heartbreaking. She's wild-eyed, traumatized. She looks like Christopher Hitchens after he got waterboarded for that Vanity Fair piece. The good news is, she's tapping out at about 15 minutes, which is very encouraging.

1 comment:

I've been learning about this with Cat's daughter, Cleo, and you ain't kidding. She's four, but the same things you outlined still apply; she's got a schedule for sleeping, but when she's over-tired the world is a living hell wraught by the hands of an out-of-control mini-demon.